The Very Serious Danger Of 'Hitting Reply All' On Wall Street

An Analyst buddy sends a group-wide email. Something about a
relevant deal and he wants to be sure that all the MDs know about
it. Not to mention, it's almost bonus time and he wants them to
know that he knows about it.

"Is he serious with this shit?" you think to yourself. Why not
give him a little grief?

So, you shoot off a quick reply. "Way to make me look bad,
d*ckhead. Get back to spreading
comps."

You chuckle to yourself. Proud of your pithy, yet topical,
comment, when suddenly it hits you...

"Oh my God. What I have I done." You hit 'Reply
All'

During my three year stint in banking, there were two things that
I feared above everything else.

Getting staffed on a "Strategic Alternatives" pitch on a
Friday afternoon

Accidentally hitting 'Reply All' on a snarky email to a
fellow Analyst

Unfortunately, I had to face Fear #1 on more than one occasion.
There's little worse than knowing that you'll have to cancel
plans so you can put together a 120 page pitchbook explaining to
Boeing why they need to sell a
subsidiary, and hire us of course, knowing that there is
no chance in hell that it'll ever happen.
Literally nothing in banking worse than spending your weekend
turning draft after draft of a useless pitchbook.

Hitting 'Reply All' is a close second, and it's something I
managed to avoid throughout my entire three years. Looking back,
I'm honestly kind of baffled that I never did it. With the sheer
amount of email you get every day (make that every hour), you
start to fire them off on auto pilot. I had a couple of close
calls, but I always managed to check to make sure I didn't hit
the dreaded Reply All button when it would've come back to haunt
me.

An article last week in Businessweek addresses the 'Reply All'
problem. Apparently, email client makers are starting to offer
fixes. Microsoft
recently released a plugin for Outlook called NoReplyAll, which
allows a sender to prevent recipients from responding via 'Reply
All'.

A company was founded on the premise that 'Reply All' is a
nuisance. Sperry Software, not to be confused with the boat shoe business, sells a simple program
that assaults users with an alert every time they hit Reply All
to any email. It acts as a failsafe mechanism to prevent any
foolish mistakes. And get this, it sells for $14.95 and has
allegedly sold hundreds of thousands of copies, making the
anti-'Reply All' business a big business to be in.